I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.
Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories
The Third Tier: Bedtime Classics
Truth be told, when I reach for a Holmes story at bedtime, I do not usually seriously consider the entire canon. More often than not, my interest is limited to about twenty stories. These are the stories that I derive the greatest pleasure in reading. A good tone, scintillating prose, excellent dialogue, and ingenuity of plot characterize the stories of the first, second, and third tiers. The stories in this third tier, such as The Golden Pince-Nez and A Scandal in Bohemia attract me, but not quite as strongly as those in the next two.
18. The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez (July 1904, Return)
A clever yet lugubrious little case that opens in such tempestuous weather that it makes one want to stay inside and get cozy while the elements do their worst without, The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez is one which sees Holmes use his faculties of deduction and manipulation at considerably high rates. He begins with an analysis of the Russian woman’s glasses, deducing, among other things, that her eyes are set closely together, that she’s been recently to the optometrist, and that she’s well dressed. Holmes’ deductions seem reasonable, and his remark that few objects provide such a wide field for introspection as glasses is astute. Thanks to the squally weather and the need for an early start, Hopkins stays at Holmes and Watson’s Baker Street address, and the three depart for Professor Coram’s house first thing the next day. When they arrive, Holmes puts his insightfulness to use again, determining that, for such a far-sighted woman, her nimbleness in effecting an outdoor escape would have been nigh-on impossible, and that, therefore, there was a likelihood that she’d remained in the house. Indeed, on finding that coconut carpeting ran both to and from the chamber where Willoughby Smith was murdered, Holmes discovers that the perpetrator likely, with her imperfect vision, took the wrong route and ended in the professor’s room. After smoking a number of fine Alexandrian cigarettes, Holmes, Watson, and Hopkins leave the professor’s room, and they make good use of their time in the garden, where Holmes subtly solicits essential information to the effect that the professor’s appetite has increased. On returning to the professor’s study, Holmes “inadvertently” knocks the cigarettes to the floor, and, after bending down to pick them up, makes the startling declaration that he’s solved the mystery at that very moment, in that very room—a declaration made possible by the fact that he’s seen that the cigarette ash (which resulted from all the cigarettes that he smoked) has been disturbed by the woman hiding in the book case. She exits on her own accord, relates her Russian revolutionary story, and dies of a poison that she’s intentionally ingested. The professor, aged and tobacco-sodden as he is, will likely never have to face such strict punishment as he’s condemned Alexis, of the Siberian salt mines, to, and Holmes and Watson make a trip to the consulate with the liberating papers in hopes of freeing the condemned revolutionary.
It seems that Doyle squeezes as much juice as possible out of the fruits of this particular story, and it’s easy to congratulate him on all the ways in which he went right. The stormy weather at the beginning of the story not only serves for atmosphere, but it plays a part in the plot. The pince-nez speculations made by Holmes are proven correct fewer than twenty-four hours later when the Russian woman appears from behind the book case. Even Professor Coram’s handicap and immobility prove essential to the plot, for Holmes’ demonstration (that the ash has been disturbed) rely on the fact that an ambulant person was in the professor’s room during lunch time. Holmes’ great skill makes this case seem to be a simple one, but, like good sleight-of-hand, the appearance is deceiving. The mystery, as Hopkins shows, was in fact a tremendously tricky one, and Holmes is at his most casually impressive when he solves, with misleading ease, a case as fraught with complexity as The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.
